2 Humans, 1 Paper (2013, 10MB, 3:38 min)

I first stumbled across Osvaldo Cibils and his marvellously eclectic and well..simply marvellous work
on Flickr but he seems to have all sorts of things going.
So simple but so, so telling. Kind of Buster Keaton meets Bruce Nauman meets something hard to pin down but lyrical, grotesque and smart all at once.
My kind of artist.
+++
2 humans 1 paper
video art/soundart.
performance with plotter paper 200 x 107 centimeters.
performers: fiorella alberti architect and osvaldo cibils artist.
place: artist’s studio. Via della Cervara, 55 – 38121 – Trento (TN) Italia
22 march 2013, 20 hours

Simply British (2013, 77MB, 4:03 min)

Hi Lucy
I think it’s really good. Who did the Hard Day’s Night remix?
I really like the way it is clearly a powerful comment on lots of things to do with the contrast between Britishness & flag waving and national hubris &c. and the actual situation for many people, but it’s never simply a piece of agit-prop.
At first I thought its slowness in unfolding might be a problem but I like the way it makes us take the time to think, with the various repeated images (like the bus with the slogan on it) but also with different material developing against the background you establish, especially the ever present and heartbreaking Big Issue guy – it turns out to be slow burning as opposed to slow. I also like the 90 degree rotation of some of the stuff and the way that then fits rather nicely into empty-ish spaces in the other “channel”. Great work – congratulations!
michael

The Caretaker (2013, 397MB, 7:24 min)

We’ve been following Morrisa Maltz‘s work since just about the beginning and we’re delighted to show here her first longer, narrative (well, if you count fever dream as narrative), piece.
Quite a lot of firepower (lots of collaborators) deployed here, happily to excellent effect ( In fact the piece actually directed by Lauren Lillie although the look of it is pure & vintage MM). It all retains in buckets the goose-bump factor of earlier work but embeds it into a very satisfyingly rounded whole.
This is great work; it deserves to be seen widely.

Blindness (1971/1991/2011/2012, 37MB, 3:18 min)

I’m a huge fan of Curt Cloninger’s work, especially his virtuosic but often profoundly moving ( and how often do you hear that word in connection with new media*?) Playdamage sequence.

Here he simply mashes up a section of a 1971 Acconci video with a Jack White cover of a U2 song.
Actually to say mashes up is making it more complex than it is which is – visuals – Acconci; sound – U2 through White. Genius – Cloninger.

*except of course for the ridiculous Bill Viola, where it’s so clearly used by the very easily pleased.

Dream Home (2012, 61MB, 1:00 min)

Don’t Know Y (2010, 116MB, 2:23 min)

I first encountered Nikki Rolls’ work through Kerry Baldry’s splendid One Minutes series.( In fact we featured another piece by her in our very first post about that series)

As with so many of the artists included in that series she’s an amply justified curatorial choice;
her work is subtle, thought provoking and very beautiful.
She makes tiny ( or sometimes none, except to select) interventions into found (sometimes “found from herself”) images or footage which have a transformative effect and an expressive force much greater than one might have any right to predict. Beautiful.

Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan (1981, 43MB, 6:01 min)

A six minute excerpt from the 45 min beaut.
The DVD comes with ‘Thursday Afternoon’ and your
option of playing either movie vertically or horizontally.

I Don’t Want Your Lasagne Furnace (2009, 41.4MB, 2:23 min)

Artists I really care for tend to fall into two distinct categories.
The first is the extensive or Picasso category – refusing to be
bound by stylistic limitations or boxes they constantly
reinvent themselves, often seeming like ten artists in one skin.
The other might be called the Giacometti or Morandi model, where
the best part of a lifetime is devoted to an intensive, deep,
exploration of a limited set of themes and content.
They have in common more than would at first appear to be the case.
They are both led by a kind of shamanistic passion, a surrender to
the unconscious, to whim, to a playfulness which can be either infantile
or deadly serious, and they reject the most common practice which is the
dull conformity of making work which attempts to guess the market,
or follow fashion or whatever.
If Sondheim is the net exemplar of the first way then Donna Kuhn
must typify the second.
Small miracles of freshness & originality mined and chiselled from
a tiny pallette! Wit and sadness both! Wonder! Delight!

What’s Opera Doc? (1957, 57.2MB, 6:52 min)

Remember the tingle down the spine when the first song kicks in in
the musical episode of Buffy?
Well, here’s the template from 1957.
Cartoons featuring talking and singing animals performing opera simply
do not get better than this.

Wishing you all a very happy holiday season…

Belt Crossing (2009, 9.1MB, 1:04 min)

Absolutely exquisite 2009 Lumière from Sam Renseiw

La Biennale (Dictum Ac Factum) (2009, 63MB, 1:40 min)

Nicely made, kind of de Chirico-ish in its
sense-of-place-that-never-was & the way it
haunts you long after viewing, this piece from
Aleksandra Domanovic featured as part of the
Padiglione Internet of the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Oh -Dictum ac Factum – ‘No Sooner Said than Done’, apparently.